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Emma is about the young, rich and spoiled Emma Woodhouse. After setting her former governess up with the dashing Mr. Weston, Emma decides that she's a great matchmaker and she should concentrate her efforts in that field. Her next project is Harriet Smith; Harriet has already received a marriage proposal but Emma convinces Harriet not to stoop so low. Instead Emma encourages Harriet to chase after Mr. Elton, the vicar. The comedy ensues when Mr. Elton expresses his desire not for Harriet, but for Emma.

If it seems sort of familiar, it is - this is the book the movie Clueless was based upon. And I can say now that the movie does Austen a great justice.________

In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland reads Gothic novels and lives vicariously through the pages. Her family moves to Bath, a change which introduces Catherine to a new group of kids and experiences about which she had previously only read. She is easily influenced and allows her romantic imagination run wild, creating a slew of confusions and complications throughout.________

Anne Elliot is the chicky-baby of Persuasion who, the reader finds, was once in love with a poor officer, Wentworth. Anne's family, of course, disapproved of his social standing and discouraged Anne from pursuing him. Now she's almost thirty, alone and basically worthless, and here again comes Wentworth into her life, except this time with a pocketful of change and much higher on the social ladder.

I like Austen. She's a fun read. She's sometimes subtle in her social satire. She makes fun of the men and women of her society, her peers, other writers, politics. She's quick, and if you blink you might miss a crack. For that reason alone I enjoyed all three books in this volume, though favor them in the exact order in which they're in this collection. I had trouble caring all the way through Persuasion, but it could be a form of brain-melting, too much Austen at one time. I still have Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park to read at some point, but I'm willing to wait until I get bit by the Austen bug again. In the meantime my heart still goes out to Ms. Edith Wharton.

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Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.

Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about 35 years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.